It’s tempting to dismiss the knee-jerk platitude that every big-spending, seemingly wasteful government entity could be fixed if we would just “run it like a business.”

People campaigning for offices in those entities say it all the time. So do the taxpayers funding them. City hall, school district, county courthouse, state or national capitol — it’s the same refrain that largely misses the point.

The primary function of a business is to turn a profit. The ones that don’t, fail. Government doesn’t. It has a broader mandate. “There’s different rules, a different mission, and the outcome is not clear,” says Mike Morath, a first-term Dallas Independent School District trustee. “Each one of our products takes 12 years to roll off the line.”

Career educators often bristle at talk of “efficiency” and “productivity,” and this is why. Such thinking, they argue, reveals an unhealthy fascination with a business mindset, a bottom-line mentality that fails to recognize that their jobs are as much art as science. This is a schism as old as schooling (and business, for that matter).

And while those educators have a point, that doesn’t mean business-oriented best practices have no value in a public school district.

In fact, they are essential.

Malfeasance, management blunders

Any educator who has struggled with a broken administration should appreciate that — especially in DISD, which is searching for a superintendent to lead Texas’ second-largest school district and where public trust has too often been betrayed.

Despite slow but occasionally encouraging progress in educating a challenging student population, DISD routinely finds itself in the headlines for disasters that have little to do with reading and writing and far more with malfeasance or management blunders. A failed human resources department. A technology fund scandal still being felt today by DISD’s inability to qualify for needed federal funding. Millions vanished in misused district credit card purchases, created almost solely by lax oversight. Car allowances run amok.

DISD needs reform at every level, from its individual campuses to its headquarters on Ross Avenue. How to define “reform”? Too many education advocates believe that a laser focus on curriculum and instruction is the way, shunting aside the less glamorous but critical meat-and-potatoes improvements needed in budgeting, record keeping, technology support and especially human resources.

Stronger principals with the authority to do what must be done? Yes. A higher quality of teacher? Absolutely. Smarter and better-aligned curriculum? Agreed. These are the appealing building blocks of a districtwide reform program.

Building blocks that cannot rise, one upon the other, without the support of an efficient, productive central office. “It is a seductive fiction that massive, troubled school systems can be transformed without revamping infrastructure and organization,” says Frederick Hess, an education expert at the American Enterprise Institute.

In other words, you don’t want those stronger principals and higher-quality teachers wasting time banging their heads against the wall because they can’t get textbooks delivered on time or vacancies filled quickly and with qualified, trained people.

Best starting point: HR

The next superintendent need look no further than DISD’s human resources department as a starting point. A recent report to the school board from the Star Employee Commission reveals significant, long-standing problems in HR. The report cites substandard expertise, communication, training, development, workflow logic, general organization, technology and orientation.

These are the sorts of structural flaws that affect the work of every district employee — especially front-line educators — and must be corrected if the district is to have any hope of improvement. Such problems make it more difficult to retain an organization’s best employees, and they hinder the recruitment of more of them. It’s also worth noting that roughly 80 percent of DISD’s $1.4 billion annual budget goes to personnel costs.

Is it reasonable to expect DISD to find in a single superintendent that educational savant, a true reformer to push classroom achievement forward, but one who also has the managerial skills to fix what’s broken at Ross Avenue?

DISD’s needs are such that it might profit from a “1-and-1A” situation. If it leans toward an educational reformer as its superintendent, that person’s top deputy almost certainly should be someone with the financial background and organizational skills to make the infrastructure work effectively.

This sort of arrangement might have helped the district’s most recent superintendent, Michael Hinojosa, whose heart was in the classroom but whose greatest failings in six years were in managing headquarters. Many within the district say he never recovered credibility from the “surprise” $64 million budget shortfall in 2008 that led to massive teacher layoffs. His commitment to educational outcomes was strong, but his ability to hire the right lieutenants — the people he would rely on — was proved suspect.

Interim Superintendent Alan King has won praise for cleaning up some of the past messes and bringing a semblance of order to Ross Avenue. He has said he’s not a candidate for the permanent job, but he has shown many of the organizational qualities a district like Dallas should value. By many accounts, he has improved relations between the administration and school board — another frequent source of painful headlines in the past — and built a welcome degree of trust.

Removing obstacles for reform

Unquestionably, DISD must improve its teaching corps and promote or recruit more of the principals who can make a difference, campus by campus, year after year. What you don’t want — what no student, parent or district taxpayer should want — is for those exceptional educators’ efforts to be canceled out by an ineffective headquarters. Mishandling taxpayer money costs a school district over and over in time, energy, talent and, most important, public trust.

That doesn’t mean running it “like a business.” That means applying the best business practices and letting them clear a path to your greater goal.

Today’s takeaway

Where must DISD’s next superintendent start?

Clean up substandard management practices throughout headquarters.

Overhaul HR, epicenter of DISD’s central office problems.

Improve hiring standards for senior administrators.

Rebuild public trust by proving to be a reliable steward of tax dollars.

The project at a glance

Our goal: To advocate for hiring a strong change agent and for instituting reform strategies with records of success.

Our work so far: Since September, we’ve published exclusive commentaries by national education experts on DISD’s future on our Viewpoints and Points pages.

Now: We’re also publishing a six-part editorial series outlining recommendations for DISD and its new superintendent:

Footholds: Good DISD stories to build on

Hiring: Priceless teachers and principals

Innovation: Shakeups that work

TODAY:Ross Avenue: Inject top business standards

Poverty: Break the cycle — or else

Wish list: Our dream candidate

READ the Tactics for a Turnaround series so far. dallasnews.com/turnaround

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